Cardiac biomarkers in the intensive care unit

Anthony S McLean^* and Stephen J Huang

* Corresponding author: Anthony S McLean anthony.mclean@sydney.edu.au

Department of Intensive Care Medicine, Nepean Hospital, Sydney Medical School, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia

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Annals of Intensive Care 2012, 2:8 doi:10.1186/2110-5820-2-8

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.annalsofintensivecare.com/content/2/1/8

Received:	7 December 2011
Accepted:	7 March 2012
Published:	7 March 2012

© 2012 McLean and Huang; licensee Springer.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Cardiac biomarkers (CB) were first developed for assisting the diagnosis of cardiac events, especially acute myocardial infarction. The discoveries of other CB, the better understanding of cardiac disease process and the advancement in detection technology has pushed the applications of CB beyond the 'diagnosis' boundary. Not only the measurements of CB are more sensitive, the applications have now covered staging of cardiac disease, timing of cardiac events and prognostication. Further, CB have made their way to the intensive care setting where their uses are not just confined to cardiac related areas. With the better understanding of the CB properties, CB can now help detecting various acute processes such as pulmonary embolism, sepsis-related myocardial depression, acute heart failure, renal failure and acute lung injury. This article discusses the properties and the uses of common CB, with special reference to the intensive care setting. The potential utility of "multimarkers" approach and microRNA as the future CB are also briefly discussed.